Money For Nothing

As XRDS-S emerges as a standard service and data linking technology, the focus will shift towards “how does everyone synchronize their service types so that we know that flickr has image data and so does myspace?”. However, myspace also has social graph data, as well as blog data. Currently the only clear cut examples on how to use URIs as service types has been done with OAuth and openID. In a group chat discussion on how to have a known list of common service types in the Data Portability Workgroup, Gabe Wachob (Gabe worked on the XRDS-S spec) registered the domain xrdstype.net in order to create a group independent entity to base Service Type uris off of. Hopefully this URI can the basis for a sane discussion on how best to work towards creating a “Rossetta Stone”-like resource. For example, this resource would allow a user agent to know that both flickr.com and myspace.com do in fact have images for user A, and it can get permission to use those images in a third party image application via OAuth+Discovery. As automation and discovery technologies become more prevailent it will be interesting to see the evolution of linked data go from disparate repositories of “potential” to being the fuel of realized useful applications.